For Tomáš the mine is the centre of his life, along with soccer, his kids and the cosy after-work beer. The 44-year-old has worked as a miner for 21 years, until the mine was closed down for economic reasons. Tomáš then re-trains as a coder in the appropriately named educational programme “New Shift”. What he doesn’t know yet is that his new skills alone won’t get him out of the crisis. A film about a tug-of-war with fate and the employment market.

In the constant ups and downs of looking for a job Tomáš shows impressive stamina, despite critical voices around him. His hopeful attitude repeatedly gets him in the local news as a positive example of successful reintegration – long before success is even remotely on the horizon. Jindřich Andrš’ first feature-length film is an equally quiet and thrilling observation. He gently follows his loveable protagonist and manages to present the tricky job situation with dignity and empathy. What emerges clearly is that unemployment and lack of jobs have long ceased to be phenomena that only occur on the fringes of our societies. They are part of a normality that the majority of people must cope with.

Riots and protests at an Indian film school, told in letters written by student L to her lover K, in which she reflects on what’s happening around her. While government forces gradually push back the rebellion, L realizes that she will never receive an answer because K belongs to a higher caste. The anonymous lines are wistful echoes of a love tragedy in times of the resurgence of a nationalistic class society.

Director Payal Kapadia steeps the visual material, compiled from a variety of sources and testifying to long, draining nights of protest, but also to great determination and a youthful exuberance, almost consistently in grainy black and white. Even mobile phone or surveillance camera footage are thus aesthetically related to 16mm student films from past decades. But against this contrast the immediate, unfinished nature of what is shown becomes all the more apparent, referencing the complex dialogue between a fragile memory and a tumultuous present that goes on in the film. A present in which questions of artistic representation, but also of personal responsibility, must be renegotiated.

A patient camera glides over the everyday objects: still lives on the wall, flowers in the vase, a swaying drop light. The sun enters the cosy home where Noëlla sits smoking at her laptop, playing Solitaire. The situation is hopeless. She’s going to lose against the computer once again. All the while her son-in-law, Pierre, is organising everything she needs, pragmatic and friendly: breakfast, the (last) doctor’s visit – and then the transfer.

Because Noëlla intends to die, and she is determined. Pierre conscientiously manages the paperwork and invites her loved ones to say goodbye. They bring photos and chat with the protagonist who is about to depart this life and who waves one last time before the doctor administers the deadly dose. Bye bye, that’s it. Dying can be so unexcited. This slowed-down, minute study of time very gradually acquires a completely different meaning from what one assumed at first. How one would love to see the onetakes from the beginning again. Félix Lamarche’s unpretentious observation evolves into a metaphor of life. Noëlla’s insistent head-on gaze from the screen into the viewers’ eyes will always be unforgettable.

For eight months, Ole Jacobs’s and Arne Büttner’s film team followed the Afghan Nasim and her family in the Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, where at times 20,000 people had to live in a space designed for less than 3,000 people. This documentary observation shows with great empathy the daily life of the mother of two who time and again manages to deal impressively with the challenges of this unacceptable and extreme situation.

Nasim previously lived with her family in Iran, where she had already endured discrimination. Her marriage is broken; the camera gingerly captures the mute conflicts with her husband – glances tell everything. Nasim suffers from rheumatism and can hardly move her hands, but she finds loving words to explain this – to her own children and others from over the way. For a while, she even fills in for the school teacher who has left: “Today we will be painting …” She herself, however, is denied the understanding she always shows for others: Everyone around her thinks they know better what she needs. When the camp goes up in flames in September 2020, every hope of a better world seems lost. Nasim is left to fend for herself – but perhaps this new disaster is a chance in disguise.

An escalating neighbourhood dispute as a pacifist parable on the Korean War. The pixilation, which Norman McLaren is said to have pioneered, makes plot and scenery look more and more absurd. The madness is heihgtened by frantic electronic sounds, which were also created by a special technique: McLaren drew optical sound signals in lines and dots by hand directly on the soundtrack.

On the balcony Nele is really close to the clouds, though it would be much nicer to take a balloon ride and be even closer. The plan isn’t easy to realise, as Nele’s mother has mobility problems. They need help with every activity and their daily life is co-organised by many other people. They are doing fine together, but a trip in a hot air balloon would be something else …

The biggest gold deposit in Europe is located underneath Roșia Montană, Romania. The ancient Romans dug shafts with hammers and chisels, later gunpowder and dynamite were used to mine the precious metal. But when the possibilities of traditional mining methods seem exhausted in the early 2000s, a Canadian company enters the scene, planning to pulverise the whole village and the four neighbouring mountains – and to use highly toxic hydrocyanic acid to extract the gold from the rock. Tibor Kocsis observes over several years how the corporation is trying to drive out the inhabitants of the village, and how a resistance is forming that lasts until today.

A drunken drive through the night with a badger at the wheel. The car radio is a crooning, rhythmic companion and rhythm generator to the reeling road, the will-o’-the-wisp headlights of oncoming cars. The beginning becomes the end of a bizarre journey that turns our heads not by speed but by narrative sophistication in visually magnificent concentration.

Manuela lives in Cameroon and was four years old when her parents went abroad to work. She’s eleven now and preparing for her first graduation. She is growing up with her grandparents and, despite leading a good life, had to struggle with grief for a long time. Now she has learned how to cope with absence and how to be together despite the long distance.

After the graduation ceremony, Ba, a young musician, leaves the hall with his tuba over the shoulder. At the door he meets his teacher who makes him promise something: report back as soon as he has found a job. As nobody picks him up at the student residence, Ba makes his own way through the barren rural area. Home at last, he discovers that his father has found a new wife who now lives with him. There is no more room for Ba. He leaves his former home and sets out to look for a job. Various futile attempts to find employment follow, first as a musician, then unrelated to his training. All efforts fail in the face of the absurd requirements of potential employers. Ba would first have to buy an expensive suit and could expect to get wages only after an unpaid initial phase, as he was still a beginner. Ba can only fend off his teacher’s intrusive questions by inventing white lies.

This world, where there is not a shred of green landscape left, where the plaster crumbles from the walls, where everything is falling apart, has no use for the musician Ba. His daily expenses consume his last bit of money. Hopes of happiness and being able to earn his living fade away. Ba’s tuba falls silent.

Hunger and hardship ruled the Piemontese mountain village of Ughettera at the beginning of the 20th century. The meek peasants complained neither about the parasitic priests nor the tough seasonal winter work in neighbouring France – not even when the Italian state called them to arms and sent them first to Libya, then into the World War. Only when the Fascists arrive did the Ughetto family trade its home for new deprivations and new hopes across the border.

With this imaginatively directed puppet animation, Alain Ughetto has created a warm-hearted memorial to his Italian grandparents Cesira and Luigi. With subtle humour, tenderness and empathy he tells of generations who lived in poverty, but also of happiness and love, fortunes and misfortunes. “You don’t come from a country, you come from your childhood”, Cesira teaches him. The director finds himself in this family chronicle, recognises his predilection for working with his hands. Soon the film becomes a reflection on telling stories with what these hands shaped. They are frequently present in the frame – piling charcoal into a mountain, making forests from broccoli or simply getting handed a cup of damn strong espresso by Cesira.

In 2017, the “Reclaim the City” initiative occupied an empty hospital in the Woodstock district of Cape Town. Their symbolic protest against the housing shortage became a new home for hundreds of people: the “Cissie Gool House”. The work conveys intimate insights into an unusual housing project that combats criminalisation by politics and the public.

In September 1968, Fidel Castro comments on the suppression of the Prague Spring in surprisingly critical terms. He opens his thunderous speech with the statement that it could endanger Cuba’s safety. Although Santiago Álvarez was the guest of honour at the Leipzig festival, this newsreel report was withdrawn from the programme. After long research it will be shown for the first time in Leipzig in this Retrospective.

Cooking is a wonderful occasion to think, reminisce and talk. And if you have never learned to cook, if you’ve spent your life seeing the place at the stove as a feminist step backwards, then you can only have braised pork ribs while reflecting on your distant first home, your mother. How fortunate then that one can also reminisce in animated form and do it so impressively that the fragrant images make our mouth water.

How does an undocumented individual document themself? This is the question the Filipino filmmaker who grew up illegally in Los Angeles asks himself. His extended family live scattered across the USA and the Philippines. Now he embarks on a journey to his estranged native country, driven by the desire to overcome a curse that has profoundly disturbed the family history over generations. The colonial past is a heavy burden even today, even in the diaspora. Filipino itself, the official language with its countless loanwords from Spanish and English, is nothing but a linguistic by-product of the colonial era.

By re-locating Miko Revereza tries to come to terms with the experience of distance and loss of identity with a remarkably idiosyncratic and creative approach. His psychogeographical filmic journey is dense and meandering, the camera sometimes literally destabilised as if by the curse. By means of superimpositions and improvised music a melancholic but never accusing memoir is created that lingers in our minds. The filmmaker, who showed “The Still Side” at DOK Leipzig in 2021, lives in Mexico today.

A background study of a dying amusement culture, filmed in slovenly dressing rooms in front of badly polished make-up mirrors. – That’s how far editor Mary Stephen follows director Yoichiro Okutani’s montage interpretation of his own footage about the Japanese strippers called Odoriko. But Stephen’s editor’s cut begins fully dressed: a tastefully lit stage overture in costume, starting from which she rearranges or rather sheds the material, reintegrating image and sound sequences originally discarded by Okutani, for example the titular statement of an Odoriko explaining her choice of profession: “It was about being nude at heart.”